there was a pretty crazy proposal for a dome structure over a large (~25 km^2) crater presented at one of the ISDC events a couple years ago by Ed McCullough, who was at the time principal scientist for Boeing. it involved autonomous self-assembling robots being used to harvest regolith to produce an extremely strong type of glass (don't remember what) that could support the entire thing with a couple of meters of stuff. the atmosphere would be harvested either from cold traps or from embedded solar wind gasses in regolith. nitrogen would be the main problem as far as materials go, actually. the entire structure would be able to withstand relatively small micrometeorite impacts without any trouble, and robots would be used to repair the surface as damage was incurred. in the case of a serious breach, 30K cold sinks would be used to liquefy the atmosphere until repairs could be completed. this model is actually a realistic way of creating a large habitable environment on the moon in a 100-200 year timeframe (main problem is technology for the robots - the material harvesting could be accomplished on order of 10 years with appropriate exponential growth from the robots).

ISRU is of course absolutely critical to the successful completion of any meaningful base on the moon. autonomous self-assembling robots that can be created with a minimal number of imported components (probably just ICs and stuff that's hard to make) are required for pretty much any meaningfully large construction given the harsh environment and cost of sustaining humans. they're not required for small habitats, maybe order of 10 people, but for a large (order of 1000s) habitat you really would have to have them in order to complete the construction. they would also be very useful for making solar panels on earth if deployed in a desert region.

realistically, the best use of a lunar base would probably as a telescope site. you can make some really crazy stuff if you happen to be on the moon, and a lunar telescope would make hubble look like a pair of binoculars if done properly. as far as lunar objectives go, this would be a good one for nasa. just landing people on the moon again is kind of pointless - they could do some nice science but it wouldn't really be that revolutionary unless they got lucky. obama's space plan makes lunar habitats more, not less, likely as constellation was designed as apollo on steroids rather than a sustainable exploration plan. we need to work a lot on technology before we can seriously consider the moon a viable place to live for an extended period of time.

obama's space plan makes lunar habitats more, not less, likely as constellation was designed as apollo on steroids rather than a sustainable exploration plan. we need to work a lot on technology before we can seriously consider the moon a viable place to live for an extended period of time.

I agreed with you up until that point. Obama's (and by consequence Bolden's) plan was a misguided Farce that would have removed the US from manned spaceflight exploration. yes there was alot of talk about doing research so that we could someday go to those places, but what good is research without the development and implimentation? neither of which were addressed in the plan. essentially saying "let someone else figure it out." It lacked vision, drive, and goals. It lacked the foresight and awareness you would expect from the president and NASA's administrator. But I digress... that is a topic for a different thread. (feel free to PM me on this)

as for the lunar constructors, have you heard of RepRap?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rep_rapi think an upscaled version of this may workinto what i think you were talking about. Send a small number of robots, and let them build the rest of the robots needed primarily from insitu resources.

geodesic structures might actually work best (not 100% sure, not a civil engineer) as they would probably be relatively easy for automated systems to construct and assemble, have excellent structural stability, and would be material efficient.

I do agree that an observatory would make a great first use for the station,

I say send up one good quality harvester unit, and let it rove across the safe flat regolith areas to gradually pick up the small amount of water that's there. Lower risk, lower chance of failure.

It's too bad the LRO/Chandrayaan-1 bistatic experiment failed, because that would have been an excellent way to detect lunar ice. Maybe such an experiment can be arranged between 2 spacecraft in the future. They should have tested it out in Earth orbit first.

geodesic structures might actually work best (not 100% sure, not a civil engineer) as they would probably be relatively easy for automated systems to construct and assemble, have excellent structural stability, and would be material efficient.

The framework for geodesic domes is really simple to build, they're extremely strong, but covering them is a nightmare. I've done a few as festival tents and greenhouses. They all ended up with an experimental feel to them due to the covering issues. I'm sure it can be done correctly by using proper factory equipment to make the covers. All mine were hand made.

moon dust has a propensity for adhering to surfaces right?coult it be statically charged easily as well? If so, i wonder if a geodesic structure, with a prefabbed cover could be 'spray' coated with moon dust, forming a shell over the structure. The prefab cover would have to be charged initially in order to attract the dust and hold it in place till a binder could also be sprayed to make a shell, but well, lol its a concept anyways. lots of bugs, i know

The terrain data comes from the Kaguya space probe, so thank you JSA; I'm also compensating for the lunar geoid using Clementine data, so thanks to NASA as well. Open science is awesome.

I had a lot of trouble with the atmosphere. Making Povray do real Raleigh scattering is actually not hard, but unfortunately the moon is so low mass that the atmosphere's going to be so deep that the gravity gradient is significant --- on Earth you can assume that g is constant over the whole depth of the atmosphere, and my maths aren't really up to calculating a proper density function. (Any ideas?)

Those two pictures above use the same density function as for Earth. The first one is scaled up by six in an attempt to show what it would be like on the moon (this was before I realised about the gravity); the strange structures on the left are actually the moon's shadow through its own atmosphere! But this was causing various problems with Povray, so the later picture has a fake atmosphere like Earth's.

Unfortunately the project rather ground to a halt because I had a lot of trouble making the clouds look right, due to Povray rounding errors, and each image was starting to take multiple hours to render on a relatively recent machine. Trying to fix the clouds by trial and error was just way too slow. What I'd really like is the loan of a 48-core machine somewhere...

At the same time, if you build in the more tranquil Mare regions, then you're also reducing the chances of a meteor strike.

Surely not! The only way I can see to reduce the chance of a meteor strike is to put the base where large mountain like objects shield you from the ecliptic plane. That would have to be in a deep crater near one of the lunar poles. Anywhere else on the moon would have a roughly equal chance of encountering a random passing space rock.